IrvingD

Today is the first day of Spring Break. School's out for the next ten days and I start thinking about all those things that'll get done before I go back. Hah! Or as one puts it in IM speak, "LMAO!" This time I got smart. I have no goals. Just do what needs to be done each day and enjoy the time off. That way-by Tuesday, April 6th-there's no guilt, no sense of having wasted all the time only to pick up the same pile of work I left in the corner on March 26th and get ready for school. That sounds like a workable plan.

Yesterday, I attended a ceremony dedicating a portion of West 61st Street off Amsterdam Avenue in New York City as "POWER MEMORIAL WAY." The renaming of that street honors the former site of my old high school, Power Memorial Academy which occupied that corner from 1938 to 1985. The corner holds a thousand memories of adolescent uncertainties, of academic strivings, pranks, accomplishments , and setbacks. Of friendships and insecurities. The corner speaks to me of countless band practices up and down W. 62nd St, and of the blasting and excavation between W. 61st and W. 60th in preparation for the new Lincoln Square Campus of Fordham University. I remember hearing the dynamite blasts from my seventh floor classroom. The building shook as if in an earthquake. Little did I suspect that society shook even more vigorously in those years between 1966 and 1970. Power Memorial opened up a dialogue between me and the outside world. It's Catholic teaching reflected the heady "...

Watching the last hours of the 2010 Winter Olympics accentuated for me just how gentle our good neighbors to the North are. From listening to the post game comments of the Canadian Hockey Team to watching the whimsical antics of the closing ceremony program, I could not help but think of that self-effacing humility which characterizes Canada. I called to mind their history with its marvelous human rights record. When our country shamelessly made broke treaties with its Native population, Canada welcomed them with more liberty and justice than they could ever receive south of the border. The same held true for African-American slaves seeking asylum. Canada became for them a Promised Land, a virtual Zion of freedom out that Egypt that was the United States of America. Over time, Canada obtained its independence from Great Britain, not by violent revolution, but by a gradual process of transfer of power from London to Ottawa. Canada outdid its former British overlords in its treatment of ...